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Open source AI is the path forward

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Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#91

Post by ks2048 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7

“The Heavy Press Program was a Cold War-era program of the United States Air Force to build the largest forging presses and extrusion presses in the world.” This ”program began in 1944 and concluded in 1957 after construction of four forging presses and six extruders, at an overall cost of $279 million. Six of them are still in operation today, manufacturing structural parts for military and commercial aircraft” [1].…

How about using some of that money to develop CUDA alternatives so everyone is not paying the Nvidia tax?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#92

Post by panarky »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #45
rvnx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be better that the government removes IP on such technology for public use, like drugs got generics. This way the government pays 2'500 USD per card, not 40'000 USD or whatever absurd.

> better that the government removes IP on such technology for public use, like drugs got generics You want to punish NVIDIA for calling its shots correctly? You don't see the many ways that backfires?

To the extent these are incremental units that wouldn't have been sold absent the government program, it's difficult to see how NVIDIA is "harmed".

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#93

Post by mesebrec »

mkolodny wrote: post #73
the8thbit wrote: post #12

"Eventually though, open source Linux gained popularity – initially because it allowed developers to modify its code however they wanted ..." I find the language around "open source AI" to be confusing. With "open source" there's usually "source" to open, right? As in, there is human legible code that can be read and modified by the user? If so, then how can current ML models be open source? They're very large matric…

Llama’s code is open source: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/llama/model.p...

This is like saying any python program is open source because the python runtime is open source.

Inference code is the runtime; the code that runs the model. Not the model itself.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#94

Post by lolinder »

mvkel wrote: post #46

It's a real shame that we're still calling Llama "open source" when at best it's "open weights." Not that anyone would go buy 100,000 H100s to train their own Llama, but words matter. Definitions matter.

Source versus weights seems like a really pedantic distinction to make. As you say, the training code and training data would be worthless to anyone who doesn't have compute on the level that Meta does. Arguably, the weights are source code interpreted by an inference engine, and realistically it's the weights that someone is going to want to modify through fine-tuning, not the original training code and data.

The far more important distinction is "open" versus "not open", and I disagree that we should cede that distinction while trying to fight for "source". The Llama license is restrictive in a number of ways (it incorporates an entire acceptable use policy) that make it most definitely not "open" in the customary sense.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#95

Post by dmix »

ygjb wrote: post #64
CardenB wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubtful that GPUs purchased today would be in use for a similar time scale. Govt investment would also drive the cost of GPUs up a great deal. Not sure why a publicly accessible GPU cluster would be a better solution than the current system of research grants.

Of course they won't. The investment in the Heavy Press Program was the initial build, and just citing one example, the Alcoa 50,000 ton forging press was built in 1955, operated until 2008, and needed ~$100M to get it operational again in 2012. The investment was made to build the press, which created significant jobs and capital investment. The press, and others like it, were subsequently operated by and then sold…

I don't think there's a shortage of capital for AI... probably the opposite

Of all the things to expand the scope of government spending why would they choose AI, or more specifically GPUs?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#96

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

the8thbit wrote: post #51
orthoxerox wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open training dataset + open steps sufficient to train exactly the same model.

This isn't what Meta releases with their models, though I would like to see more public training data. However, I still don't think that would qualify as "open source". Something isn't open source just because its reproducible out of composable parts. If one, very critical and system defining part is a binary (or similar) without publicly available source code, then I don't think it can be said to be "open source". T…

Here’s one list of what is needed to be actually open source:

https://blog.allenai.org/hello-olmo-a-truly-open-llm-43f7e73...

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#97

Post by mupuff1234 »

mattnewton wrote: post #70
rybosworld wrote: post #54

Huge companies like facebook will often argue for solutions that on the surface, seem to be in the public interest. But I have strong doubts they (or any other company) actually believe what they are saying. Here is the reality: - Facebook is spending untold billions on GPU hardware. - Facebook is arguing in favor of open sourcing the models, that they spent billions of dollars to generate, for free...? It follows th…

I actually think this is one of the rare times where the small guys interests are aligned with Meta. Meta is scared of a world where they are locked out of LLM platforms, one where OpenAI gets to dictate rules around their use of the platform much like Apple and Google dictates rules around advertiser data and monetization on their mobile platforms. Small developers should be scared of a world where the only competit…

Sure, but don't you think the "not getting locked out" is just the pre-requisite for their eventual goal of locking everyone else out?

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#98

Post by Maxious »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60
fweimer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't these public clusters exist today, and have been around for decades at this point, with varying architectures? In the sense that you submit a proposal, it gets approved, and then you get access for your research?

Not--to my knowledge--for the GPUs necessary to train cutting-edge LLMs.

All of the major cloud providers offer grants for public research https://www.amazon.science/research-awards https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/programs/credits/research https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-academic-research/

NVIDIA offers discounts https://developer.nvidia.com/education-pricing

eg. for Australia, the National Computing Infrastructure allows researchers to reserve time on:

- 160 nodes each containing four Nvidia V100 GPUs and two 24-core Intel Xeon Scalable 'Cascade Lake' processors.

- 2 nodes of the NVIDIA DGX A100 system, with 8 A100 GPUs per node.

https://nci.org.au/our-systems/hpc-systems

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#99

Post by meowface »

FinchNova12 wrote: post #85

> Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult. Mostly unrelated to the correctness of the article, but this feels like a bad argument. AFAIK, Anthropic/OpenAI/Google are not having issues with their weights being leaked (are they?). Why is it that Meta's model weights a…

>AFAIK, Anthropic/OpenAI/Google are not having issues with their weights being leaked. Why is it that Meta's model weights are?

The main threat actors there would be powerful nation-states, in which case they'd be unlikely to leak what they've taken.

It is a bad argument though, because one day possession of AI models (and associated resources) might confer great and dangerous power, and we can't just throw up our hands and say "welp, no point trying to protect this, might as well let everyone have it". I don't think that'll happen anytime soon, but I am personally somewhat in the AI doomer camp.

Re: Open source AI is the path forward

#100

Post by [deleted] »

Oras wrote: post #13

This is obviously good news, but __personally__ I feel the open-source models are just trying to catch up with whoever the market leader is, based on some benchmarks. The actual problem is running these models. Very few companies can afford the hardware to run these models privately. If you run them in the cloud, then I don't see any potential financial gain for any company to fine-tune these huge models just to catc…

[deleted]
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